Can Mobile Scanners Expand Access to Ultrasound?

Mobile health devices aim to ease healthcare, and perhaps even expand it. Clarius Mobile Health, for instance, set out to “enable more clinicians to use ultrasound to improve patient care,” the company reports on its Web site. The company then went on to develop wireless Clarius Ultrasound Scanners for scanning various parts of the body and for guiding short procedures, describing the devices as "almost as easy to use as the camera on your smart phone." To date this year, the company has delivered more than 1600 scanners, shared Clarius CEO Laurent Pelissier in a news release.
Clarius has now entered into an agreement with Hologic Inc., it was announced. Hologic focuses primarily on improving women’s health.
“We’re very excited to partner with a company that places the same value on image quality and accuracy as we do here at Hologic,” stated Pete Valenti, Hologic’s Division President, Breast and Skeletal Health Solutions. “The exceptional image quality and portability of Clarius’s ultrasound system, coupled with our industry-leading deep learning algorithms, bring us one step closer to ensuring all women have access to the breast care they need and deserve.”
Such access is greatly needed. Hologic reported that “of the 1.5 billion women worldwide who are eligible for breast cancer screening, less than 5 percent of them actually receive these critical services.”
Clarius Ultrasound...

At last week’s RSNA conference in Chicago, we got a chance to learn about Seno Medical Instruments, a San Antonio, Texas company, and its imaging technology that combines conventional ultrasound with a new modality called optoacoustic imaging. We spoke with Dr. Tom Stavros, Medical Director at Seno.
The company’s Imagio system relies on a duplex probe that looks and acts like a regular ultrasound transducer, but that also emits laser light to simultaneously work as an optoacoustic imaging device. In optoacoustics, laser light is used to add energy to tissue, which is then released in the form of ultrasound...

Authors: Agarwal R, Diaz O, Lladó X, Gubern-Mérida A, Vilanova JC, Martí R
Abstract
Mammography is the gold standard screening technique in breast cancer, but it has some limitations for women with dense breasts. In such cases, sonography is usually recommended as an additional imaging technique. A traditional sonogram produces a two-dimensional (2D) visualization of the breast and is highly operator dependent. Automated breast ultrasound (ABUS) has also been proposed to produce a full 3D scan of the breast automatically with reduced operator dependency, facilitating double reading and comparis...

Hologic (NSDQ:HOLX) said recently that it won FDA 510(k) clearance for its Quantra 2.2 breast density assessment software and that it inked a development and distribution deal with Clarius Mobile Health for its wireless, handheld ultrasound scanner.
The Marlborough, Mass.-based company said the Quantra 2.2 software uses a proprietary algorithm to analyze mammography images for the distribution and texture of breast tissue to produce patient-specific breast density assessments.
“As the global leader in breast cancer screening technology, we relentlessly pursue the development of clinically superior products that ...

A 68-year-old woman with a recent history of blurring in the left eye had undergone mastectomy for breast cancer twenty years ago. A series of bone metastases started five years after her diagnosis. Examination of the optic nerve head of the left eye revealed an isolated epipapillary mass. Indocyanine green angiography displayed vessels within the mass, and fluorescein angiography demonstrated hyperfluorescence of the mass from vascular leakage plus lobular spots of blocked fluorescence. B-scan ultrasound revealed a hyperechoic elevated nodular mass on the optic disc.